(Newspapergrl)
is an online PR pro who has blogged for American Express OPEN Forum, Marketing Pilgrim and Small Business Trends. Her book, "I Need a Killer Press Release, Now What??" is about online press releases.

I got an invitation to check out a dropshipping site called Drop Ship Access. I decided to check it out. I’m always looking for companies who will drop ship products. That makes it easy to have an online store without a lot of capital. No need to buy inventory. You make the sale and the customer pays the retail price. Then you call the company and have them charge you wholesale and send the product to your customer. You don’t have to stock products or handle shipping and returns. They have another place selling their products. It’s about $40 a month to sign up.

Places like Doba and Drop Ship Access are another middle person. Ideal if you need products fast to make a web site so you can get accepted by a dropshipper. You probably won’t get the most competitive prices. But the biggest problem here is that you have no access to the manufacturer. You can never develop a relationship with the supplier directly because you don’t have a relationship with them. In business that’s how you get ahead. It’s all about relationships. You negotiate terms and as you sell more you get better prices or arrangements. The best part is just having a good relationship so you know what is happening. The bestselling items. New items. Out of stock items. The more information you have the easier it is to market effectively. Plus, it’s more satisfying to develop relationships.

Drop Ship Access says they have Adidas – you think it’s the shoes, but it’s perfume. It doesn’t have a lot name brands from what I can see. They sell Estee Lauder perfume for $54.29. The same perfume retails on Estee Lauder’s site for $68. That’s not terribly bad. However, the most I could find it listed for in the top Google results was $62.99. The lowest was $47.75. So if you figure that you probably won’t sell it for full retail and that it looks like you’ll have to sell a lot to make much on this item.

I’d like to review more drop ship sites so if you know of any that will give me a free trial, let me know. I would really like to try World Wide Brands. Or, if you retail or manufacture a product that you would drop ship for small to mid-size online retailers, fill out my contact form. I coach a lot of people who are looking for products to sell.

Conclusion: I’m still learning about drop shipping but right now I’m still sold on The Shipper because of the price and selection plus the free trial. They could do a lot more to make the site easier to use, but it’s a good entry level site. WorldWideBrands looks promising though. Higher fees, but a much larger selection.

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WorldWide Brands is excellent. I’m not sure if they have a free trial or not, but really an excellent, reliable company. We’ve been with them almost 4 years now. We’re eBay Power Sellers. I’m interested to check out The Shipper because of your recommendation. Thanks!

I got membership on DropShipAccess and found their services to be Excellent. I get super-fast delivery for my orders and good customer support. Not sure if you recently checked them out but I am satisfied and it’s worth my money.

Dropshipaccess has fast delivery time. I can say that my orders are dispatched same day or latest by next day. I started with their 7 days Free trial and am now with them for 2 years. Good Dropshipper!

I know this comment is pretty old, but I thought I should clarify what Craig said: The Shipper changed its name to Wholesale Match in January of 2008 to help their SEO and make it obvious that they’re a database that provides connections to suppliers, not a supplier themselves. Wholesale Match is not affiliated in any way with Doba – they are competitors. I know this because my husband has worked with Wholesale Match for years. Wholesale Match is a good company – the only database of dropshippers I know of that provides a 100% money back guarantee if you don’t make the cost of your membership back. You just have to use the service at least once a month.

I was not going to leave a post because I didn’t want to add any more popularity to this ridiculous review, but I did some research on the claims because that is always good practice when looking up information on a site and I decided that they were outrageous enough to say something about.

First off I would like to say that I was recently working in the SEO industry and have been building websites as well for several years. While working as a business and marketing couch for this SEO firm I learned all about different drop shippers like DOBA, supposed marketing companies like thrive, and various other ins and outs of the whole thing.
I wanted to do some research on my own when starting up my e-commerce website and so I did some digging. I found Drop Ship Access. It seemed great, and I looked up some reviews, looked hard for fraud information and then looked for professional sites talking about the service.
I wanted to do one last look and had not made my final decision until reading this post.
Because this is the most negative information I have found on them and because I found out all these claims were outrageous I have decided to go with them.
One person claimed they were DOBA, if they had signed up for the trial they would have noticed that there was no call from DOBA letting you know about them, with a subtle sales pitch thrown in. Which is what they do when you sign up at any level with any affiliate of DOBA, because they track it and do a follow up to sell you on their service outright.
Also to the person who said they are in Utah, that is not right. DOBA is, but Drop Ship Access is based in Monroe, Michigan. You could have found that no problem if you looked at their BBB records which is an A. Not that I am saying trust that, because it is not a valid way to look into a company, and people who rely just on BBB scores are foolish.
Also I think that the person who wrote this review should stick to things that they know more about and perhaps have experience in because it is very apparent that you do not have experience with dropship companies and you state it clearly yourself.
I don’t mean to be condescending or rude but since the information is invalid and the claims are wrong I figured someone should say something about it. Thank you.

i can say this i m selling since 7 years on ebay
last 3 years %80 from dropship

if you like dropship website ,
1 sameday -or nexday shipping
2 realtime stock
3 no membership fee or monthly fee
(maybe 1 time little fee is okay )
4 if you open google if you find dropship from fist search page .it mean is every body can find same as you .
so they will list many items like you .

These dropshippers aren’t worth the money. It’s fast and easy but,they make all the money, you do all the work and advertising for them. These companies are all related, they have multiple owners and company names so they can just keep taking your money. It’s all a waste of time because the prices are too close to retail for you to really make a profit. This is from 3years experience with a number of different companies

I don’t want this to sound like i’m advertising or anything but I’m with this other drop ship program called Maestro. They do something similar to DSA but are focusing primarily right now on international foods from Asia and Europe. I did some of my research and found that they offer very competitive prices even when compared to some of the actual physical asian-type supermarkets in the area. Their website is http://www.maestrolicensing.com. Go check it out if you’re interested!

Hi,
Am new to this drop shipment business. At present am doing affiliate for various products for the past 12 yrs. I’ve fair knowledge in SEO and have experience to promote the websites. With my 12 yrs of experience in affiliates, am very much interested in drop shipment. Am looking for good dropshipment companies for long run and am ready to pay any fee, if it is applicable.

According to World Wide Brands, which I am a member of, it’s said if you have to pay a dropshipper for a membership it’s not a true dropshipper. I’ve found that to be true. I use many dropshippers without a fee. A fee based company generally speaking has wholesale prices that are impossible to make a decent profit on Ebay or Amazon. If you have your own web site with lot’s of traffic it could work. If you want to find real suppliers try http://www.thomasnet.com Good luck.

I am the new kid on the block. I have already had some problems, including one with drop ship access, but they will ship the same or better item to my customer or I will have their hides.
Anyway, how many small fry have any chance to actually develop relationships with manufacturers anyway? Very few do.
Think about that before you call these companies “scams”.

I am just starting to research about starting my own business and I have read a lot of positive reviews of Drop Ship Access so I am considering it. I have looked into World Wide Brands and it looks like you have to do all the work yourself of contacting each individual company plus pay a BIG upfront fee. I was not impressed! However, I will keep researching what is out there since I don’t plan to take the plunge for several months yet. I learned a lot just reading the comments here. Thanks for the info!

I’m new to drop shipping and signed up with productsourcing.com and weeks later I got a call from a web developer Maxebiz who says they partnered with Doba, who is affliated with productsourcing.com to help ppl develop e commerce sites. Maxexbiz is currently building me a site and I plan to sell Doba products. They only problem I see is Doba prices is very high and they’ll be making all the profit. I agree with newspapergurl.It would be nice to work directly with the manufactor. Does anyone know of a good health/beauty dropshipper?

I have signed up with DOBA and they do have alot of products my problem with them was it would say they had inventory and when I went to purchase it the item’s were on backorder causing my customer’s to go elsewhere. I lost my $395.00 and just left don’t waste your money or time on them. I was looking at DSA and might give them a try. I have tried a lot of sites just looking for a company that says they have a product when they actually do.

I just got a very pushy sales call from Maxebiz which works with Doba. It was one of those ‘this offer runs out today’ type of calls. I was tempted because I have wanted to get moving with drop shipping but haven’t made time, so the urgency seemed good. When I looked at all the site examples on maxebiz, though, they all looked like they hadn’t been touched in years… ghost sites. So that raised my internal alarms. When I said I wanted to think about it and this (being put on the spot) is not the right way to do business the sales guy for Maxebiz said ‘Thanks for wasting my time.’ To me that reaction and the whole pushiness and lack of consideration (the call was at 7 pm my time) reflects badly on Doba, too. If that is how they have to get people to work with them it’s pretty unsavoury. I won’t be doing business with Doba, I’m pretty sure.

Michael, I agree. Why would they charge so much money when you’re selling their products? Thomasnet.com is a good way to find suppliers, you just have to work. I’ve been going at this for 6 years and have been scammed . Oh, and Ally, I’m sure you know this by now but Maxebiz is a scam as well.I have just been scammed by them although, thank goodness, I didn’t pay them the $15,000 that they wanted.In fact I have to order a new paypal card today because of them.
Anyways, thank you NewspaperGirl for the useful info and good luck to everyone else and I hope you figure it out and become successful at it.
I’m not an expert, I am just sharing what I’ve learned.